The Dance of the Pro-Trump Republican

Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has called President Trump a human “wrecking ball” for American foreign policy, and warned that Trump was bringing the world to the brink of “World War III.” But the Senate Foreign Relations panel Corker chairs is about to get a lot more Trump-friendly.

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Sen. Jim Risch, the conservative Idaho Republican who now stands to take over Foreign Relations next year, said in a new interview for The Global Politico that Corker is wrong about his Trump-as-wrecking-ball theory and that he plans to air disagreements with the White House far more privately than Corker has done. In his first extensive remarks about his outlook on Trump and foreign policy since Corker said last week he will definitely not run again, Risch praised Trump for “gaining traction,” “moderating” his views and having “picked up on how important diplomacy is.’

“I think he’s dealing with it substantially better than what he started with, which is to be expected because obviously, experience is a huge asset, particularly when you’re dealing with diplomacy,” the senator, a hawkish former critic of Trump’s, told me.

On North Korea, for example, Risch insisted that Trump was in fact now open to diplomatic talks with North Korea, but the senator, who had just returned from the Olympics in South Korea, warned that the president was also serious about military options that could bring a “cataclysmic” war on the Korean Peninsula. As for actual diplomats, the future Foreign Relations chairman downplayed the consequences of a Trump State Department still missing appointees in numerous key positions. Although the U.S. currently has no envoys to 41 nations, including key countries from South Korea to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, Risch responded that it did not matter. “Things are not a whole lot different when there’s an ambassador there,” he told me.

Like Corker, Risch used to be a very public Trump skeptic. He worked against him in the Republican primaries in favor of his Senate Foreign Relations Committee seatmate Marco Rubio, and when he went to the polls on Election Day in 2016, he told reporters he would only reluctantly vote for Trump, calling the future president a “distasteful” choice.

But now that Risch, a 74-year-old former governor of Idaho little known outside his state, is in line to become the next chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (assuming Republicans keep control of the Senate), he appears to have made his peace with a president who continues to challenge Republican foreign policy orthodoxies on issues from free trade to Russia. Trump, Risch told me in our conversation at his Senate office the other day, remains a unique and “strident” public figure, but his critics, whether in the Senate or among European allies and the media, are worriers who overstate the dangers of the president’s unorthodox approach and fail to appreciate a foreign policy that has been far less radical than some of the president’s rhetoric would make it seem.

“This president, like every president, wants to be successful. He understands how important our relationship is with other countries. He takes a more strident approach than other presidents have. I think we can all agree that this president is different than the other presidents that we’ve had,” Risch says. “But look, this is America. We are a strong country. We will weather this and get through this, just like everything else. And that’s the strength of the government and the country that we have.”

In fact, he said, he just spent several days meeting with alarmed Europeans leaders on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, and “if you think that there are people here in America wringing their hands, you ought to meet with the Europeans.” But Risch said he had a simple message for them: “We are going to be just fine.”

That message, it seemed to me, was a perfect distillation of the uncomfortable embrace of Trump by the Republicans in the Senate, and especially when it comes to its formerly hawkish national security wing. The cognitive dissonance of the Trump era is never on better display these days than when one is trying to pin down Republican members of Congress on what they actually think about the president. Sometimes, their frustrations break into the open, especially when the president, as he did last week, appears to casually jettison key Republican policy positions on everything from gun control to the advisability of trade wars.

But in general, GOP members of Congress have been remarkably averse to taking on Trump publicly even when they disagree with him, resorting instead to a combination of vitriolic off-the-record attacks on the president and anodyne on-the-record remarks that hint at their discomfort while at the same time finding ways to lavish the compliments on Trump he clearly relishes.

The conversation with Risch was a classic of this new genre. On the one hand, the senator made little pretense of substantively agreeing with Trump on his approach to the world, rebuffing my efforts in the interview to get him to give any examples of issues on which he found Trump to have moved or moderated his positions. But he also never said a critical word about any Trump policy — even though our interview came on a day when the president was seeming to abandon the party’s views on gun control and blasting Risch’s “close, close, close personal friend,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Instead, Risch praised Trump, insisting that, despite the naysayers in the press and the handwringing U.S. allies, the president is actually growing in the job. “He’s gaining traction on this,” Risch told me, while also calling out Trump’s “determination,” “strong will,” and overall forceful approach.

In general, Risch adopted an extremely pragmatic view of Trump that suggests resignation, if not acceptance, of the president’s bomb-throwing ways. I call it the He-Is-What-He-Is Approach.

Unlike many veteran Republicans around town I’ve come to think of as the Reassurers, for example, Risch did not try to pretend that Trump’s pronouncements don’t matter or that his Twitter feed is merely a cartoonish distraction from the more sober-minded policies actually enacted by his advisers.

“Well, folks, you’ve got somebody right now who tells you what’s on his mind at any moment, at any time,” he said. “So it is what it is and I guess everybody will deal with it as they deem appropriate. Maybe it falls in the category of ‘be careful what you wish for,’ but you’ve got somebody who tells you what’s on his mind clearly and precisely, and using the technology that most people use today to communicate.”

Later, Risch returned to this formulation when I asked why and how he had changed his mind about Trump since opposing him in the primaries and holding his nose to vote for him in the 2016 general. Trump, he said carefully, “was elected by the states to be the president of the United States. I accept that, and he is what he is.”

In a way this sums up the current politics of Trump on Capitol Hill very well: They can’t change him, they have to nod to the enduring political appeal he holds to their Republican voters, and they can’t risk openly disputing with their thin-skinned leader without facing the very real prospect of losing their access, enraging their supporters or driving the president toward policies they disagree with even more strongly.

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Just a couple weeks ago, Senator Risch made his first foreign-policy headlines when he attended the Munich Security Conference, warning the assembled global elites – already a Trump-wary bunch — that the president was in fact serious about war preparations for North Korea. This, he said alarmingly, would be “very, very brief” since the results would be “one of the worst catastrophic events in the history of our civilization.”

When we met for the interview the other day, Risch was still trying to explain what he had meant, since the pronouncement was taken to mean the Trump war talk was serious. “GOP Senator Says Trump Is Ready to Start War with North Korea,” blared the headline on the left-leaning website The Intercept; other coverage was similar.

But Risch said in our interview that while the quotes may have been accurate, the interpretation was not. “They did write headlines saying ‘Trump was ready to go to war’ etc. etc. That was not the intent.” He and other senators had been briefed by Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster before the Munich trip – Risch alluded to this by saying only that his information about Trump’s plans had come from the “highest, highest possible level” – and wanted to convey both how devastating any war with North Korea would be and to put to rest the ongoing speculation that the administration was considering something less than a full-scale attack as a way of heading off North Korea’s nuclear program. Such a “bloody nose” strike, Risch said bluntly, would just be “dumb.”

The incident doesn’t seem to have had any long-lasting international diplomatic implications, but I found it an instructive example of just how impossible it is these days for someone like Risch trying to influence – or even explain – just what is the administration’s foreign policy.

At various points in our conversation on North Korea, in fact, he told me that Trump was serious about negotiations, but also that he had come away from his talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in wondering if the old “appeasement” camp in South Korea was once again pushing for negotiations with the North that would lead nowhere. Risch acknowledged, in fact, that America’s alarm at the moment – driven no doubt by Trump’s nuclear-tinged rhetoric about raining down “fire and fury” – was greater at the moment than what he found among the South Koreans.

Trump, Risch insisted, would somehow resolve this.

“I’ve spoken with the president. He is a determined person. Whether you like or dislike President Trump, he is a person of strong will. He is a person who, when he makes up his mind and is determined to do something, he will do it,” Risch said. “And he has said and telegraphed plainly what his view is of the North Koreans possessing a weapon that can threaten the United States with a nuclear bomb and that Kim Jong Un needs to listen to him very carefully. He’s not dealing with Barack Obama anymore; he’s dealing with Donald Trump.”

So what’s the policy? I couldn’t tell you. I did learn, however, that the next chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is almost certain to be publicly supporting it.

Susan Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist and host of its weekly podcast, The Global POLITICO. Subscribe to The Global POLITICO on Apple Podcasts here. Subscribe via Stitcher here.